First we heard that the singer Adele, a smart, powerful woman, found the pressure to breastfeed “fu**ing ridiculous.”
Now comes evidence that even Kim Kardashian is vulnerable to that same intolerable pressure. Kardashian, another extroardinarily powerful woman, could not bring herself to own her decision to stop breastfeeding her son Saint. Instead she blamed her two year old for “forcing” her to quit.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#B71705″ class=”” size=””]She blamed her two year old for “forcing” her to quit.[/pullquote]
According to Yahoo News, North West Forced Kim Kardashian To Stop Breastfeeding Baby Saint:
…Kim has now admitted that she was forced to stop breastfeeding Saint because her two-year-old daughter, North, was getting too jealous…
Speaking on her sister’s chat show Kocktails With Khloe, Kim explained: “North West stopped that for me. You’ll die when I tell you what she did. First of all she’d cry so much and try to pull him off me.
Kim quit and then North had a change of heart:
“She said to me this weekend: ‘Mummy, I’m not mad anymore. You can feed baby brother and I won’t cry.’ And I was like: ‘Honey, the milk’s all dried up.’”
I don’t believe for an instant that North “forced” Kim to quit. Toddlers are often jealous of baby siblings and are not shy about expressing that jealousy. I’ve heard everything from “let’s send the baby back to the hospital!” to “let’s throw the baby in the trash!”
It never occurred to me, nor to any other mother of young children, to take directions from a toddler on how to treat a baby. I suspect that if North had begged her mother to put the baby in the closet, she wouldn’t have done it. And I suspect that if North begs her mother not to go out for work or celebrity appearances, Kardashian does not give in. It is not credible that she stopped breastfeeding Saint because North made her do it.
Kardashian stopped breastfeeding Saint because SHE wanted to stop breastfeeding. Perhaps she found it painful; perhaps she found it inconvenient; perhaps she wanted her body back; or perhaps she had no specific reason at all. It ought to be her choice to use her breasts when and how she wishes to use them.
But it’s not. The breastfeeding industry, including lactation consultants, La Leche League, and the so-called Baby Friendly Hospital Iniative have struggling mightily to thoroughly moralize breastfeeding. They’ve exaggerated the benefits far beyond what the scientific evidence shows. They conjured speculative “risks” to formula feeding. Most importantly, they’ve drummed it into everyone’s heads that the “good” mother breastfeeds.
Not every mother can breastfeed (5-15% of women don’t make enough breastmilk) and not every mother wants to breastfeed or breastfeed for an extended amount of time. But the pressure to breastfeed is crushing. Adele couldn’t bear it and apparently Kim Kardashian can’t bear it, either.
The ultimate irony is that breastfeeding has nothing to do with being a good mother. Breastfeeding is one of two excellent ways to feed an infant. Two generations of Americans were raised nearly entirely on infant formula and infant health parameters improved steadily during that time period. Breastfeeding is integral to the philosophy of attachment parenting, but the psychologists who elucidated Attachment Theory never looked at what an infant was fed, merely that it was fed. They found that mother-infant attachment occurred spontaneously when the “good enough” mother met the baby’s needs for food, protection and love. No special foods or parenting behaviors are required.
You know the pressure to breastfeed has become intolerable with Kim Kardashian is afraid to own her own decision to stop. If powerful women like Kardashian are being crushed by the pressure, average women don’t stand a chance.
We’ve got to push back against the breastfeeding industry that has moralized breastfeeding and return women’s breasts to women’s control.
